SOURCE: Rechy, John. “Discharging the First Duty of Life.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (5 November 1989): 12.

In the following review, Rechy offers a positive assessment of This Boy's Life, analyzing its perspective on the nature of truth and memory.

“Memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story,” Tobias Wolff writes in the acknowledgement page of his splendid This Boy's Life: A Memoir. But memory does not always tell a “truthful story,” and Wolff exemplifies this immediately: “… my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.” This dichotomy is extended in the book's epigraph, from that master of artifice Oscar Wilde: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.”

Life and art melded for Wilde, and all biography assumes a pose. To assert that it is possible to re-create more than...